Biden Voted for Iraq War

A post from the left-wing Institute for Public Accuracy:  MSNBC Enables Biden’s Pattern of Iraq Lies. ​Watch this video: WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War (narrated by Danny Glover)

The Real Joe Biden

By Cliff Kincaid

Originally published on October 9, 2012

Known for making humorous and outrageous gaffes and statements, Joe Biden’s history of plagiarism goes back to the time when he ran for president in 1988. Biden had delivered, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Political scientist Larry Sabato has noted that this led to revelations about a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years, reports of exaggerations of his academic record, and the discovery that he had stolen quotations from other politicians, including Bobby Kennedy, in other speeches.

As we noted back in 2007 on the issue of Biden’s plagiarism, Biden had insisted in a book, Promises to Keep, that he failed to credit Kinnock on only one occasion, and that the media had exaggerated the incident. But why was he quoting from a biographical speech by Kinnock in the first place? Didn’t Biden have his own story to tell? In another case, a reporter asked about Biden using a Bobby Kennedy quote without attribution. Biden blamed this on “one of my speechwriters” who “had inserted an RFK line” into the speech “without telling me.”

This is the closest Biden has come to admitting he doesn’t write his own material, and that he repeats what others put in front of him. On other occasions, however, he is on his own, and that seems to be the most worrisome.

About.com has compiled “Bidenisms,” a series of “Dumb Joe Biden Quotes and Gaffes.” Some of the best:

• “Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.”
• “I promise you, the president has a big stick. I promise you.”
• “A man I’m proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next President of the United States—Barack America!”

​Time Magazine compiled the “Top 10 Joe Biden Gaffes,” noting, “Throughout his decades of public service, the former Senator and current Vice President has earned a reputation for often saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

From September 7, 2008

Jonathan Beecher Field, an assistant professor of English at Clemson University, wrote a very interesting article recently for InsideHigherEd.com about Biden’s “track record of intellectual dishonesty.” This is what plagiarism is all about.

Referring to the plagiarism in Biden’s career, he said that while he would vote for Obama, “Biden’s dishonesty matters to me in two ways. It suggests something of Biden’s character, indeed, in a realm more relevant to doing his job than was John Edwards’s philandering to his. The other reason is selfish. Now that Barack Obama has deemed a plagiarist worthy of the vice-presidency, it becomes more difficult for me to make the case in the classroom that plagiarism matters. More broadly speaking, Obama’s choice has made it harder for me, and for my colleagues across the United States, to defend the principles that form the foundation of scholarship.”